This year’s Spring Commencement, held on Sunday, May 21, 2017 at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, saw more than three hundred undergraduate and graduate candidates earn their degrees. While it’s always a day of celebration for the graduates, their families and friends, this year’s ceremony was marked by a very special moment.

With the start of the Spring semester, students in Edgewood College’s ‘Pre-reading and Literature for the Young Child’ practicum are completing part of their requirements on-site at Madison’s One City preschool. One City is a nonprofit preschool located in South Madison.

Zander Rothering, a junior Biology major from Richland Center, Wis., gets visibly excited when he talks about the summer of 2016. He and twelve other students traveled to South America, where they journeyed from Quito, Ecuador to the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles west of the continent.

We caught up with Jourdyn Mootz ‘16, a native of Merrill, Wis. Mootz graduated in December 2015 Magna Cum Laude, with a degree in Biology. Currently, she’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, in the Physician Assistant program. She reflects on her time with the Bonner Leaders, a national service-learning leadership program for undergraduate students.

Although Kate (Schneider) Melendres ’04 received her B.S. in Psychology more than ten years ago, she credits the opportunities she enjoyed here for making it possible to reach great heights (so far!) in her professional life.

Faculty scholarship takes many forms at Edgewood College, ultimately enriching the academic experiences of our students. Along with a busy spring season producing concerts and recitals, teaching classes, and preparing for final exams, several music department faculty members had major performances in Madison.

Edgewood College celebrates another year of outstanding undergraduate research when it hosts “Edgewood Engaged” in late April, a yearly research and creative inquiry symposium. This year, the College also celebrates distinctive recognition for a project that was showcased at last year’s event.

“It was a bit of a challenge when I started. But I’m a student now.” When Chuck Monzon was finishing high school, he had “no idea” what he wanted to do next, he just knew it wasn’t going to college. His mother jokingly suggested the military; in a surprise move, he joined the U.S. Air Force.